Saruman Rules The Prairie

In North Dakota, the fact that landowners don’t necessarily possess mineral rights on their land has made life hell for some amid the state’s petro-boom. Excerpts:

The chemical trucks returned on February 9. Brenda emailed the governor’s office asking for air quality monitors. There was no response. That night, their seven-year-old granddaughter, Ashley, who lives on the same road less than a mile away, woke up screaming from a headache. On February 10, the governor’s office called, saying the governor would speak to the head of the Industrial Commission’s Department of Mineral Resources, Lynn Helms. Nothing happened. The fracking started on February 18. Brenda quit hanging out laundry to dry because the clothes smelled so bad and the air burned her nostrils.

Then, in August of 2012, the Jorgensons had their worst scare yet. Richard and Brenda had just finished a long drive home from a funeral service when they found that the gas flare on the well 700 feet from their house had gone out. They could smell the foul, rotten-egg scent of hydrogen sulfide gas, and knew that along with it would be a cocktail of methane, butane, and propane. The couple didn’t know what to do. Petro-Hunt hadn’t given them an emergency number, and when they called the company’s office no one answered and there was no way to leave a message. So the couple threw open all the windows in their house, turned on fans, and left to move their horses farther away from the gas line.

Brenda phoned me that night. She was in tears and at wits’ end. “Who do you call?” she cried. “What do you do?”

And:

North Dakota’s political establishment – Democrats and Republicans alike – view the oil boom as a huge success. Thanks largely to the new oil play in the Bakken, the state’s economy is surging. More than 41,000 workers were hired in North Dakota between 2008 and 2012, and the state has the lowest unemployment rate in the country. National leaders are pleased, too. All the oil pouring out of North Dakota has markedly improved US energy security. As recently as 2005, the US was importing 60 percent of the oil it consumes; today imports account for 42 percent of consumption. “Kuwait on the Prairie,” is how one headline writer described the Bakken.

But not everyone is happy about the situation. Traveling across northwest North Dakota it is not difficult to find farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans who are outraged by what they are experiencing. Many North Dakotans view the oil rush as an assault on their communities and the places they love. The current oil rush seems to them different than the last oil boom that took over the state in the 1970s. The petroleum in the Bakken Shale is what the fossil fuel industry refers to as “tight oil,” or what environmentalists call “extreme energy.” Like the petroleum locked in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, shale oil is hard to get at even with the most advanced technologies. All of the extra effort involved in extraction means that Bakken oil has an especially heavy impact – on water resources, on land use, on wildlife and habitat, on the fabric of communities. The oil rush in North Dakota has turned life there inside out. As White Earth rancher Scott Davis puts it: “We’re collateral damage.”

The anger some North Dakotans feel toward the oil and gas industry is fueled by the feeling that the situation is totally out of their control. In many instances, people say, the oil companies haven’t been invited to drill – they’ve just invaded.

Read the whole thing. There’s an account from a farm couple whose cattle are being poisoned. The wife herself is being poisoned by chemicals used in fracking. But they can’t sell their land and leave because it’s now worthless because of the poison. Saruman rules the prairie.

They say it’s coming to my parish. Everybody’s excited by how much money we’re going to all make.

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“They say it’s coming to my parish. Everybody’s excited by how much money we’re going to all make.”

When my wife and I moved to Montuak we were what Richard Florida would later make a name for himself by calling us “knowledge workers”. We enjoyed the benefits of full-time residence in a village that was really only a 10 week Summer tourism town.

It was lovely.

Since then three things have changed.

The first is that that a lot more players have come to the knowledge/digital/geographic abritrage game, with the not surprising result of “knowledge worker” wages going down and property values and other costs in pleasant but economically challenging to live in place areas going up.

The second is that Montauk has become fashionable, with all that that entails for better or for worse.

The third is that we have turned the lion’s share of our efforts away from the “knowledge economy” and towards the hospitality industry.

The result is that things are happening in our town that 10 years ago we would have found distressing, but now we see them as opportunities. Of course we have mixed feelings about that.

If I could go back 10 years and prevent the oil boom in northwest North Dakota, I would gladly do it. The housing shortage, the high rents, the destruction to roads, the danger to the environment, the increase in crime, the families living in tents or in four-wheelers in city parks, the greed … I don’t think it was worth it for the oil money.

The solution to this nightmare and other nightmares that stem from our increasing damage to the environment and our insane hunger for fossil fuels is to do what Ross Douthat says to do and keep raising the population more and more. T

Thanks for this post, Rod. My wife comes from Sidney, Montana on the east side of the Bakken. The agricultural economy there (wheat, sugar beets, beef) has been disrupted by the oil boom. Unfortunately, similar scenarios have played out across the West whenever there’s been a rush to extract oil, gas or minerals. It’s even worse when coal is strip-mined. In Southeast Montana, ranchers have had their land mined out from under them to provide electricity for folks in Seattle. It’s economic colonialism, with the Northern Great Plains serving as a National Sacrifice Area.

I suppose it might be justified if Americans were doing all they could to conserve. But its a shame to disrupt communities, scar the land and endanger human health just to prop up our wasteful, automobile-based lifestyle.

Add in the horrible traffic that means you’re taking your life in your hands to drive on those roads and the increase in fatal accidents, many of them cars being hit by semi-trucks. Jobs are plentiful up here but people can’t afford to pay rents that top San Francisco’s or New York City’s, so there are shortages. They’re flying in people from Wisconsin during the week to work at Menard’s. Western North Dakota was beautiful at one point but I’m very much afraid that it will be destroyed by the oil business.

“North Dakota it is not difficult to find farmers, ranchers, and Native Americans who are outraged by what they are experiencing. Many North Dakotans view the oil rush as an assault on their communities and the places they love.”

Yes. I get that and I feel their pain. But the ranchers and farmers might want to realize that the “farming and ranching rush” that made their communities viable not all that long ago were at one time seen as an assault on someone else’s community. THEY were Sauron.

And to a certain extent, they still are. Why do we need all that fossil fuel? To power a culture in which they take part.

I want prosperity. I want solid, blue collar jobs that allow young men to graduate from high-school and make family sustaining wages to support many, many children. I want these jobs to be in small towns so people can live near their families. I want the energy to power those industries. I want that power to be cheap and plentiful.

I am against fracking.

Well, I want all that cream pie and I want the rock hard abs.

If you want high-paying blue collar jobs and the energy to support them… this is what it looks like.

Don’t tell me about windmills either. Maybe 25 years from now. But that’s too long to wait if you’re 24 and your wife is pregnant and you have a GED.

When I was 18, in 1991, you could graduate from high school in my town and get a job paying $14.40 in a plant. That moved to about $22 in a year or so. A house cost $40,000. That’s how you get stay-at-home moms with five kids.

By the time I was 30, the $22 an hour jobs were mostly gone, and starting wage had fallen to $8.50. The population of my rural county fell 17 percent between 1980 and 2010.

The other day, I talked to a guy who graduated two years after I did. He’s making $130,000 a year in the gas fields. His wife stays at home. He has four kids now.

You should look into the Texas Railroad Commission. There is a place for the regulation of business. The TRRC has a long history of taking care of this kind of business properly. I suppose the situation is too new for ND government to be on top of things, but it’s not like an oil boom has never happened before anywhere in the U.S.

The localized environmental impact of the gas boom in ND (and elsewhere) is indeed a serious issue and worthy of our attention. To the extent that it can be mitigated – either through sensible regulation or through collecting slightly higher use taxes on drilling activities to fund programs that alleviate the impact then we should think about doing just that.

But let’s acknowledge some realities:

1) There is zero chance that the global economy will be significantly less dependent on fossil fuels at any point in the next 20, maybe 30 years. Not going to happen. And if it did happen then the amount of human suffering that would arise as a result would be immense. Radically scaling back energy use would mean much slower economic growth and much higher unemployment in the developed world, and likely a humanitarian crisis in China. And “green” energy alternatives will simply not be a significant part of the global energy mix in the next 2-3 decades.

2) The natural gas currently being extracted from the Bakken (and other large shale formations) is a substitute for burning coal in electricity generation and for crude oil in petrochemicals manufacturing. While natural gas isn’t a perfectly “clean” fuel or feedstock, it is vastly less damaging to the environment than coal or oil. Net-net the planet is much better off because of what is going on in these gas drilling regions (though again, there may be localized impacts that are net-net negative). The US, which famously refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty, is a helluva a lot closer to complying with Kyoto targets than most actual signatories to the treaty precisely because we’ve substituted relatively clean burning gas for relatively dirty burning coal in electricity generation.

3) Without the jobs boom occasioned by the development of gas fracking in US in the last 5-10 years the US economy would be much worse off than it is. Full stop – end of story. Many tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of mostly blue collar workers would be out of jobs. If you are concerned about a politics that offers real opportunity to blue collar families then I would challenge to find a realistic alternate source of jobs. Keeping in mind of course that actual jobs in oil and gas fields are a small % of the total jobs created by this activity, which include incremental jobs in capital equipment manufacturing, transportation, commercial construction, and petrochemicals manufacturing.

4) The idea that agriculture on the upper great plains is threatened by the development of oil and gas drilling in the Dakotas is laughable. A tiny fraction of agricultural land will be converted to drilling fields, and in return the presence of cheap local natural gas feedstock will mean that nitrogen-based fertilizers can be produced locally. This will substantially reduce the input costs of farmers in the region (an economic boon to producers that will strengthen the financial position of countless family farmers) and will be good for the environment as much of the nitrogen fertilizer used in the upper great plains today is urea manufactured in China using the dirtiest methods imaginable and then carted on ships to NOLA and then on barges up the Miss. river.

Again – there may well be localized negatives that we should take seriously. But curtailing these developments will necessarily mean imposing on the world many other (and I would argue – MUCH larger) costs.

And if I may be a bit more pointed, tut-tut lectures on the evils of fossil fuel development from someone who recently put 5 people on a round-trip trans-atlantic flight for non-essential purposes are a bit rich.

In 1971 my parents bought a home in a small Illinois community for $6000. It was on a double lot and served the family well until Dad’s death in 1999.

Last week I saw an ad for a home just down the street in that same community (that has lost about 20% of its population since 1971). It was also on a double lot, and was priced at $125,000.

This is progress. And we want to have yet more babies because we want more progress.

As for the fossil fuel “renaissance” we are enjoying, I find myself agreeing with John Michael Greer in his view of the situation. This is the start of a five part series that explores a possible future for our nation. Not sure how we can avoid something like this, especially if we decide we need to preserve the race by having more babies.

I’m with Sam M. on this. I grew up in West Texas. In the 1970’s there were good blue collar jobs, strong communities, big families, big churches, etc.

In the 1980’s the oil bust and farm crisis hit at the same time. My grandmother lived in the Texas panhandle during the depression and the dust bowl. She told me once that the 1980’s seemed worse to her. My hometown lost over a quarter of its population between the late 80’s and 2004. I had to leave in 1993 because there was no work. Houses and businesses were boarded up all over the place.

Fracking is starting to bring a lot of those small towns back to life. The economy in West Texas is starting to wake up. There are jobs again. Yes, it’s a dirty business with a lot of downside. No question. But before recently the main choices available to a lot of young people there were either go on food stamps or move to Dallas.

I’d like to live near my dad and sisters, and raise my kids near their cousins in the same town where I grew up. Rod, I’d like to do what you have done, but I’m not a writer. The return of industry in West Texas, even a dirty one like fracking, means I might have that option.

Of course, this whole conversation is going to/has lead to comments about our “evil selfish automobile lifestyle”. I can’t roll my eyes further into the back of my head. Instead of engaging in self-righteous austerity oneupsmanship, hows about we innovate our way out of fossil fuel consumption while maintaining our lifestyle? This would be a great way for Republicans to embrace the issue while differentiating themselves from at least some on the left.

But then what happens if we just shift our raw material burden from one set of minerals to another? Sam M is on point.

SD: And if I may be a bit more pointed, tut-tut lectures on the evils of fossil fuel development from someone who recently put 5 people on a round-trip trans-atlantic flight for non-essential purposes are a bit rich.

You may a bit more pointed, but I will point out in return that yours is a stupid remark, along the lines of those put out by people who say Ross Douthat can’t be critical of population decline unless he’s had six kids on his own. Is it really the case that to lament what is being done to the countryside in North Dakota requires one to swear off fossil-fuel use? You are reading way too much into my comments. It seems to me a false choice that we must either have no development at all, or we must accept whatever destruction industry throws at us.

Rich: Fracking is starting to bring a lot of those small towns back to life. The economy in West Texas is starting to wake up. There are jobs again. Yes, it’s a dirty business with a lot of downside. No question. But before recently the main choices available to a lot of young people there were either go on food stamps or move to Dallas.

I hear you, and Sam M has made this same point about his region eloquently on previous occasions. I would say, though, that if you read the Guardian story to which I linked, the people in there who are having their lands ruined and themselves and their cattle poisoned are real people too. What good does this boom do them, when their land and health is destroyed? I have mentioned in this space before how my own parish here in Louisiana really needs some kind of industry to bring jobs to this rural community. But what happens if the fracking industry comes and poisons our water and ruins our landscape, and starts making people really sick? What good is all that if the land becomes uninhabitable?

My partner grew up in Eastern North Dakota and still has sibilings in the area who tell us about all the goings on both good and bad with the oil boom. I have some precaution concerning fraking, but I think as we all cluck our tongues about how bad this is, I am thinking about the costs that are borne by someone all the time to provide energy to fuel our modern lifestyles.

The people who live near oilfields are paying the price, as our coal miners in Appalachia and Wyoming. Even people near nuclear power plants have to do deal with the fear being near one and concerns of where to store nuclear waste. All of our renewable energy takes large amounts of land and even with windpower, there are some disruptions.

I’m not saying that we should just not care. What I am saying is that it takes a lot to produce energry for our cars and iPads and smartphones. Someone somewhere is going to pay the price for the energy that we use. I doubt that any of us is going to give up our cars and all the modern goodies we use.

I should add that the love for electric cars hides the fact that right now at least, the energy that powers the car more than likely comes from a coal fired plant or natural gas (which also has it problems with extraction).

Our modern economy comes with a cost, as does everything in our lives. We need to be mindful of that and we need to find ways to mitigate the burdens those near energy sources have to bear.

But we shouldn’t think we can easily wash our hands of this matter. Unless we plan to live in the woods in a log cabin without electricity, we are all implicated.

PS: You want to see pure, unadulterated PR genius? Check out this ad Range Resources, one of the biggest players in the Marcellus Shale play, is running all over western Pennsylvania. Hint: it has nothing to do with gas. it has to do with manufacturing:

There is something to this. The Rust Belt isn’t where it is because Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford like the churches in the Midwest. The Area offered access to RESOURCES. And not just the stuff. I am talking about ENERGY. Natural gas made Pittsburgh. Coal made Ohio. And not by accident. They built huge power plants to make sure energy was cheap, and the factories followed.

In Pennsylvania, there is a huge push to tax the gas. It’s complicated. But what would play better politically (forget environmentally for a moment) would be a plan that capped what percentage of the gas could be pumped across state lines. Force them to keep some percentage for local use. The cost of heating your home would plummet, but who cares. The cost of running a factory would plummet and people would build them like mad. Johnny wouldn’t go off to major in psychology at some college in Erie, Susie would stay home and have six babies, they’d have the time and money to take care of sick families. it’s be 1950 all over again.

And the rivers would be orange, the fish would die and lots of people would get cancer.

You can mitigate the latter. We can do better than we did in the 1880s. But if you want 1950, you are going to get 1950.

There are no good solutions to this conundrum. Resource extraction could be done more cleanly, but not at the price points we are willing to pay for gas and electricity. Essentially when the economic harms come to the folks who live in the area of the extraction the rest of us are passing the true costs of energy use on to them. Other Matt has a good point about innovation away from fossil fuels being an answer, but there will never be economic pressure for this option if people like the farmers in this story are subsidizing our energy use. And with the influence that energy companies have on all political parties regulations or market corrections are out of the question.

Dennis, you’re right about how we’re all implicated — and I say this as someone who lives maybe three miles as the crow flies from a nuclear power plant. I would much rather run the risks with nuclear power than with fracking.

Isn’t this really just a property rights issue? If implicit in the purchase of the land was the belief that the owners would posses rights from the soil to the sky then these companies would find themselves in a legally actionable position. One group of people is imposing a externality on another group of people which under the common law allows the affected party to bring forth a claim. The article didn’t touch on this, but how is it that these companies are violating these persons property rights?(assuming these farmers have the property rights.)

I can’t resist a few observations as a fellow Louisianian, & in full disclosure, a lawyer who has represented both landowners & O&G companies. I do so with some trepidation because I realize that they may come off as more critical than I intend them, & because I think we all have gotten more sensitive to the costs of our “deal with the devil” as a result of the BP spill(s), & even the natural gas sinkhole in Iberville Parish (where I am from).

Nonetheless, I can’t help but hear in the Guardian story & some comments here the kind of “doomsday-ism” that tends to turn off moderate “crunchy cons” like me from environmentalist arguments.

First, in Louisiana, of course, ownership of the land includes ownership of the minerals under the land, so that is a difference from the North Dakota scenario. Secondly, these kinds of operations have been occurring with the Haynesville shale for quite some time, & there is no evidence of the type of abuses there. I’m sure the plaintiffs lawyers finding all kinds of abuses are on the horizon, but as of now, there have been no allegations of the kinds of widespread “poisonings”, & the last I checked, DeSoto Parish was still the same boring landscape it’s always been, albeit with fewer trailer homes due to them selling to the companies and moving. Third (and here’s where I sound like a corporate hack), I think environmentalists tend to underestimate the importance and cost that most exploration companies put into making sure their activities are safe, & this is especially true of the smaller, largely “locally” owned companies. This is a point that segues into the industry development comments, because I think one over-looked aspect of this issue is that most “oil & gas companies” are small operators contracted with by the big boys to do the work, & the owners and workers in these companies are locals with extensive knowledge, & extensive love for the communities & environments in which they live & work. I know because in part I grew up in a household with that kind of worker. And these “locals” are the ones hit hardest when regulations come down from on high to make drilling safer. This was made obvious during the BP spill. These operations are “ecosystems” of various companies doing different things, but when something goes wrong, there is a rush to get “Big Oil.” Yet Big Oil can afford the new regs, in fact, likes them because it just makes it harder for the smaller independents to compete with them.

Anyway, I’ll shut up as this is too long. But I do think we should be sensitive to the host of issues embedded in fracking, etc. It involves balance & nuance that, sadly, often seems to be lacking in stories like this.

Nuclear power is wonderful and safe, until it isn’t. And when it isn’t we don’t end up with the water being unsafe to drink for a generation or so, or the land needing extensive reclaiming before it can be tilled again. All of that (depending on the remediation method used) can take place in 60 to 100 years.

“You may a bit more pointed, but I will point out in return that yours is a stupid remark, along the lines of those put out by people who say Ross Douthat can’t be critical of population decline unless he’s had six kids on his own. Is it really the case that to lament what is being done to the countryside in North Dakota requires one to swear off fossil-fuel use? You are reading way too much into my comments. It seems to me a false choice that we must either have no development at all, or we must accept whatever destruction industry throws at us.”

Its not an either/or, but around the margin there is a very real conflict between high discretionary consumption of energy (long distance jet travel is remarkably fuel-intensive) and turning up your nose at the way energy is actually produced.

The hydrocarbons have to come from some place, and they have to be extracted in some manner. I see no reason to be more morally concerned about people living around gas fields in North Dakota than I am about people living around oil fields in Saudi Arabia or Venezuela or West Texas for that matter.

I fully acknowledge that there may be a need to mitigate the local impact of production. But that doesn’t that the development of these resources in net-net bad. Specifically:

1) Gas substitutes for coal and oil, and thus is better for the environment globally
2) There is no realistic alternate source of living-wage blue collar jobs on the horizon for the US economy in the foreseeable future. Extraction jobs cannot, by definition, be sent to China.

The tone of your reply suggests that you are peeved and offended by being confronted with the tradeoff. But the guy who titled his original post “Saruman rules the prairie” isn;t exactly starting the dialog off in a spirit of nuance and charity.

[Note from Rod: I’m not offended by being confronted with the tradeoff. I am offended by your dumb argumentum ad hominem.– RD]

“The people who live near oilfields are paying the price, as our coal miners in Appalachia and Wyoming.”

The coal miners in Appalachia might beg to differ. Last I checked, the average West Virginia coal miner was earning about $65,000 per year, and that was several years ago.

We keep talking about how these industries make the communities unlivable. I get that. But unlivable for whom? Someone working at the courthouse next to a paper mill might call the stench unlivable. The guy making $75,000 per year in the papermill might think it smells like money.

In most cases, the people most eager for this kind of extraction are the people who others are trying to protect from this kind of development.

We keep saying that these scars are irreparable. I get that, too. But the Allegheny National Forest was once known as the Allegheny Brush Heap, it was cut over so heavily. Entire towns burned to the ground because of oil running through the streets in the Bradford oil fields. On the other hand, Bradford PA, had a chandelier store because so many people were rich.

Is Bradford, PA, unlivable? I don’t know. Seems pretty nice. It’s still there. All the deer and turkey and bears that were exterminated are back. A while ago, National Geographic Explorer declared that West Central PA is “as pure as the Pantanal or the Gobi.” Yeah? Except the area they are talking about was among the most heavily exploited and polluted landscape in world history not all that long ago. It’s about as “pure” and “virgin” (stange terms to use, no?) as a crack addled street walker.

You say that oil and gas development will denude the landscape, making it completely uninhabitable. The people who live here will point out that Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller already tried to do that. Even without an EPA, they failed. We’re still here. It’s nice. We have an elk herd.

When you say you are worried that the poor miners and gas workers are paying the price for this development, they don’t much appreciate your concern. Fair or not, what they hear is a flatlander coming up to take their job away and take food out of their kids’ mouths in order to preserve some scenic beauty you might take in twice every five years.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Again, I am not saying that’s fair. But that’s how it sounds to them. I understand that they have all kinds of pressures that might be coloring their long-term judgement. But we all do.

There is so much oil around here that the early settlers didn’t even need to drill wells. Get a shovel and dig a little. The hole would fill with oil. If you tried a little harder, you’d get a lot. So much that the streets would literally run heavy with it.

The water’s fine.

That’s not to say it can’t be ruined. I believe it can be. But that’s the history you need to overcome.

Is it worth the risk? I don’t know. But we are not talking about a bunch of Rockefellers making millions. We are talking about huge numbers of men who would love to be earning $64,000 a year in a small town with a wife who stays home with five kids.

What’s that worth?

It’s a good question.

I live here. I work a white collar job. How much pollution and noise and risk should I accept in order to keep the people around me gainfully employed?

Other places have done this better. Alberta here in Canada has a surface rights board that makes sure those who only have surface rights are adequately compensated. I haven’t heard of any issues with farmers and ranchers, so I presume it is doing a reasonably good job. Another commenter seems to imply that Texas has better mechanisms to deal with this too. It may be that places which have a longer history of dealing with oil and gas extraction have developed better ways to work these problems out.

sd: “The idea that agriculture on the upper great plains is threatened by the development of oil and gas drilling in the Dakotas is laughable.”

Well, it does until you take into account the amount of irrigation that is required in many areas to produce crops. Perhaps you should drive around areas and take note of the number of irrigation rigs in fields. Maybe you should even take a look at the recent increases in irrigation in states such as North Dakota, South Dakota, and Nebraska. Setting aside the needs of the growing number of humans in this region for potable water, I trust you can see how your flippant dismissal of the issue is, itself, laughable.

For the guy with a 90 IQ who’s making 100k a year, it was definitely worth it. But those sort of people don’t write blogs. I don’t mean that resentfully, but someone needs to stand up for their interests. And their interest is in economic growth.

I wonder where the Sagebrush rebellion people fall on this one? What would Sarah Palin say? The Cato Institute?

There is a “market-based” solution. What the extractors are doing is imposing costs of doing business on residential neighbors (and probably employees as well). The basic rule should be, if you want to operate in an area where people live, farm, or work at some other trade, you construct your drills and piping so NO pollutants drift their way, their life is undisturbed, and you figure the cost of doing so into the price of your product. Alternatively, you buy them out, at the inflated prices your activity has stimulated, so they can be made whole moving elsewhere.

A little imposed planning would also be helpful. No, you can’t just come in here and start drilling all over the place. First you start a small pilot, with a team of trained people from wherever, then you train apprentices from the local population, then we start programs in local community colleges, and you estimate how many people will be needed in addition from outside the state. Fracking companies, state and local government, local real estate people and contractors, work together to build the housing stock required. NOW you can start drilling more wells.

Guerilla alternative: When your home is engulfed by gas, drive away and light a slow burning fuse. When it blows up in a ball of fire, sue the pants off the operators.

>We need oil. We don’t need North Dakota for much of anything but oil.

Before dissing North Dakota, one should deal with the fact that an extraordinarily high percentage of those born and raised there get college degrees. Confirming things I heard a number of years ago, see “States With The Highest College Completion Rates” in today’s Huffington Post. I suppose that the college grads tend to move elsewhere, but the State keeps producing them just the same. Let’s not begrudge credit where credit is due.

“This will substantially reduce the input costs of farmers in the region (an economic boon to producers that will strengthen the financial position of countless family farmers) and will be good for the environment as much of the nitrogen fertilizer used in the upper great plains today is urea manufactured in China using the dirtiest methods imaginable and then carted on ships to NOLA and then on barges up the Miss. river.”

As long as conservative efforts to disembowel the EPA and cut other “crippling” business regulations are thwarted. Otherwise the folks of Wever, IA (where ground was recently broken for Iowa’s newest fertilizer plant) and the surrounding areas (which includes my home, as I live but 12 miles north of the plant site) will probably resemble some of those areas in China you are referencing in that quote, sd.

The farm couple who can’t sell their land because it has been contaminated, why couldn’t the county or the state condemn their land under eminent domain? Also, North Dakota should do what Alaska does and send every state resident a check from oil revenues.

The Wet One: I live in Midland, Texas. You mentioned the Texas Railroad Commission and you are exactly right. North Dakota officials and oil and gas company executives should meet with Texas officials and oil company executives to learn what we do to mitigate environmental and social effects from the oil industry. And even we in Midland and elsewhere in Texas can do better. Andrea mentioned the housing shortages, high rents, and increase in oilfield traffic which has led to destruction of roads and increased accidents in North Dakota. Well Midland and the surrounding parts of West Texas have those problems to.

The oil boom is complicated while it certainly complicates lives out here in western ND. But whatever we think of it, ND is wonderful place to live, in my opinion. I don’t see Charles’ point in picking on us.

“you construct your drills and piping so NO pollutants drift their way, their life is undisturbed, and you figure the cost of doing so into the price of your product”

This is what I mean. No pollutants. With the no CAPITALIZED. This is the definition of pulling up the ladder. No business anywhere has ever had NO IMPACT on surrounding people. A farmers market brings traffic and exhaust fumes. Anything requiring a roof or a parking lot entails polluted storm run-off. I am sure someone somewhere is allergic to the smell of pizza. Noise. Light. Voices. Anything that disturbs.

But there you have it. The zero impact solution. Which cuts out oil production, gas production, nuclear, solar, windmills. You name it.

Reading this article made me sick. I understand the need for progress and energy production. But it can’t come at such a high cost to communities, to the natural world, to vulnerable children. What I don’t understand is, in a world where you can win a lawsuit against McDonald’s when you burn your leg with their coffee, why can’t some of these people sue the pants off these oil companies? Are they so rich that they could swallow the cost of any successful suit whole and not even pause? If so, at least someone might get enough cash to fund the purchase of suitable land somewhere geologically highly unlikely to have hydrocarbon deposits of any kind.

“The farm couple who can’t sell their land because it has been contaminated, why couldn’t the county or the state condemn their land under eminent domain? Also, North Dakota should do what Alaska does and send every state resident a check from oil revenues.”

The problem is, it may not be just a farm couple or two. Take a look at this map, especially the area covered by the Northern Great Plains aquifer (#1 on the map).

Groundwater contamination, like so many other topics, is complex (to say the least). I am not an expert in this area…far from it. But I have worked with our local Army Ammunition Plant as part of their Restoration Advisory Board. Part of the scope of work includes dealing with groundwater contamination from 45 years (give or take) of discharge into the small streams leaving the plant and heading towards the Mississippi River.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, as the contamination problem came to light, and as we started seeing just how big a problem existed, the Army paid to move residents in a two county area from their well water to rural water, which in this case was water piped in from over 50 miles away.

This was just from one, relatively small operation. The operation did not penetrate the surface of the ground save in two, well-defined disposal areas (landfills). And we were fortunate in that the contamination was relatively easy to treat “in situ” thanks to a very creative method of bioremediation and the presence of the Mississippi River. In another 75 to 100 years folks there should be able to go back to wells if they wish.

These are pumped through the aquifer, through the drinking/irrigation water that we depend on for life.

How much of the land under the Northern Great Plains aquifer are we prepared to take under eminent domain? How much of that cost are we going to absorb as taxpayers, and how much will we pass on to the companies who do the contaminating? How long will they be on the hook for the remediation project, or do we trust the natural drain process in that region to eventually funnel it out of the area?

More importantly, how long will people pump that gunk out, thinking they are getting clean water, and spread it on their farmland? The discharge from IAAAP went undetected until the EPA Superfund project began cleaning up shutdown lines there and started tracing out the discharge route. Estimates are that people used contaminated water for at least 15 to 20 years.

“What I don’t understand is, in a world where you can win a lawsuit against McDonald’s when you burn your leg with their coffee, why can’t some of these people sue the pants off these oil companies?”

They are starting to do just that. These are some of the “frivolous” lawsuits our fine Congresscritters want to limit, and also one of the prime reasons we are hearing them complain about the “crippling regulations” offered by the EPA. Anytime you hear a Congresscritter telling you they want to restrict the EPA, check their funding stream. You’ll likely find a company that is tied to fracking as one of his/her primary contributors.

Another good reason to be grateful Obama won. And before someone says it, no, his record on this issue – clean energy – is not perfect, but it’s better than Romney’s would have been. If you want proof, big coal threw all the support they had to Romney.
My home state of West Virginia voted for Romney, largely because of this issue (with a not insignificant racism component). Obama is hated enough that when a convict ran against him in the Democratic primary in WV, that convict got a signficant number of votes. Of course right now coal is losing ground to cheaper natural gas, ironically from fracking. And while natural gas produces less carbon dioxide than burning coal, it is still a fossil fuel. I am afraid that along with “mine, baby, mine”, and “drill, baby, drill”, we are stuck with “frack, baby, frack”.

“We keep talking about how these industries make the communities unlivable. I get that. But unlivable for whom? Someone working at the courthouse next to a paper mill might call the stench unlivable. The guy making $75,000 per year in the papermill might think it smells like money.”

“Some residents near Cabot wells in Dimock began reporting dramatic changes in their water quality. On New Year’s Day in 2009, methane that had built up beneath the concrete cover of a private water well blew up, ignited by the well’s electric pump. The explosion got the attention of regulators and the media.

The DEP, which is responsible for regulating the industry, began an investigation. Cabot denied its drilling was responsible, insisting that methane migration was a naturally occurring phenomenon in northern Pennsylvania.

Anti-drilling activists blamed hydraulic fracturing, the process of injecting large amounts of water, sand, and chemicals deep into a well to shatter the shale and release natural gas. The DEP’s investigators said no chemicals associated with fracking were found in the drinking water, but in the public’s mind, “fracking” became the culprit.

The DEP’s investigation eventually concluded that Cabot’s poorly constructed wells were to blame. It said Cabot’s contractors had failed to properly seal off the wells with concrete. Natural gas was able to migrate upward through voids outside the steel casing that lined the wells, providing a pathway for methane to leak into shallow aquifers and then into private water wells.

But the DEP’s investigation took a long time to reach a conclusion, and Cabot’s response to the residents seemed cold and indifferent. Some Dimock residents, who were angry they had signed leases for small sums before the scale of the Marcellus discovery was known, sued Cabot in November 2009, claiming their property and health were affected.

“One of the things I’ve learned in the shale wars, there are people and interests that profit from conflict,” said Hanger. “There’s certainly money to be made from fighting, whether it’s lawyers, consultants, or fund-raising appeals. There’s probably more to be made out of a good old fight than a peaceful resolution.”

The DEP concluded that 18 water wells serving 19 households had been contaminated and ordered Cabot to fix its gas wells. When the repairs failed to eliminate the methane problem, it ordered Cabot to plug three wells in 2010.

The DEP’s experience in Dimock prompted the state to rewrite its well-construction standards, and to enlarge the area that drillers are presumed liable for impairing water quality, from 1,000 feet to 2,500 feet from a gas well. Drillers now typically test water in private wells within a half-mile of their drill sites, to establish a baseline should problems arise.

Even after Cabot was forced to repair its wells, methane continued to be a problem with some Dimock residents.

The Rendell administration ordered Cabot to pay for a $12 million pipeline to bring fresh water to 19 households. Cabot objected, and so did some residents in Susquehanna County, who saw the project as excessive, and feared they would be left paying the cost.”

Sam M seems to have confused “no pollutants” with “no impact.” It is not infeasible to contain and capture all volatile gases from a drilled well. It just costs more. The additional costs would include hiring more blue-collar workers to do the more elaborate work required. If there is sufficient demand for the product, some business will meet the requirements to extract and sell it. Like I said, failure to do this means the residents downwind are SUBSIDIZING the business that is not paying the full costs of production.

I have a fair amount of respect for North Dakota. Charles Cosimano lives in Waukesha County, which produces nothing but Republicans. We don’t need Waukesha County for much of anything. We might send everyone from Cosimano’s neighborhood to work in the oil fields, and offer their palatial homes to refugees from North Dakota.